Dell e520 ICH8R Retail Snow Leopard Install

Posted 03 November 2009 - 03:17 AM

blkhockeypro19

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Hello, the following guide will hopefully guide you in installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on a Dell e520. The Dell e520 that I own has an ICH8R SATA controller that operates in two modes; Autodetect/ATA, and Raid On. Some e520's do not have any ATA settings, and only have Raid/AHCI settings available to set in the BIOS. If this is the case, please refer to vmarsh's great Snow Leopard guide.

If you are using the "Autodetect/ATA" setting in the e520's BIOS, then you have come to the right place. Before we begin, you need to make sure that your e520 has a "Core processor family." By this I mean: Core Solo, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Core Quad, etc. Once you verify this, go out and spend 30 bucks on Snow Leopard and a blank pack of DVD's / CD's. You're almost done, double check that you have a hard drive with a GPT partition scheme, and you are willing to loose the data on this disk.

2. Burn "cdbootSnow_e520.iso" to a blank CD or DVD using Disk Utility in Mac, Windows Explorer in Windows 7, or a 3rd party program such as Power ISO / Magic ISO.

3. Restart your computer and tap the F12 key until the boot menu appears. Arrow down to the CD/DVD Drive. Press Enter and the boot disc you just burned will load.

4. When a grey boot loader appears, eject the boot disc you burned and pop in the retail Snow Leopard disc that you purchased. Once the Snow Leopard disc is inserted, press F5 on your keyboard. The boot loader will reload and you should see a new selection called "Mac OS X Install DVD."

5. Use the arrow keys to highlight "Mac OS X Install DVD." For diagnosing purposes, you can optionally press the down arrow on your keyboard, highlight verbose mode, then press Enter.

6. After this, white text should appear on your screen. If you never get to an installer window and it freezes on "Still Waiting for Root Device," check to make sure your BIOS setting is on "Autodetect/ATA." If that is correct, then your computer is not supported by my guide do to most likely a chipset revision by dell on the e520 model at some point. You will have to research this on your own.

7. Once you get to a language select screen, select your language of course, then the installer will load. Click Utilities at the top of the screen, then click Disk Utility. Partition your hard drive with a GUID Partition Map. Exit disk utility when your partition has completed.

8. Select the partition you created to install Snow Leopard to. Let the install finish. If the installation fails, please report that to me in the comments!

9. When the install completes, restart your computer and swap in the boot disc you burned earlier and tap F12 as you did previously. Load from the CD/DVD drive. At the boot selector, rather than swap in your Snow Leopard disc, select the partition that you just installed to. Once again, you can optionally boot with verbose mode to diagnose any problems. If you get "Still Waiting for Root Device" or a "no smoking" sign over the grey apple, report that in the comments!

10. Go through the initial setup.

11. Once your on the Desktop, download these files (You may need to use a flash drive): Download

12. Double click Post Install.zip and extract the files.

13. Open "Post Install.pkg" and set the destination disk to your Snow Leopard partition.

14. Open OSX86Tools.app and select Install Kexts. Set the destination disk to your Snow Leopard partition and select the 2 kexts in the folder "S/L/E." (Intel82566MM.kext and VoodooHDA.kext)

15. When OSX86 Tools finishes installing the kexts, do not reboot. Now comes the time to pick: a. Copy the included DSDT.AML to the root of your Snow Leopard partition. (May or may not work.) b. Use DSDTSE (google) and follow this and this. (Will work if done properly.)

16. Once you have DSDT.AML in the root of your Snow Leopard partition, you can restart. When you reboot, you will be prompted by a boot loader without the need for the boot disc you burned earlier. Keep this as a backup incase you break your install. When you boot up, you will have ethernet, audio, and full 64 bit support.

17. To get video working, use osx86 tools to inject an EFI string for your graphics into com.apple.Boot.plist.

Hope everything worked! Comment with feedback please!

NOTE: If your hardware differs from mine in any way, I cannot guarantee success. (Although, even if it does match mine, I can't guarantee success =P)ICH8R Sata ControllerStac9227 audio codec

Posted 03 November 2009 - 09:07 PM

mozbeats

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This sounds great

I've been running 10.5.6 successfully on a Dell DXP061 / Dimension 9200 for around a year or so. Over the past couple of weeks I've been reading up on Snow Leopard installs. I think tonight I might give your method ago. Wish me luck.

Posted 03 November 2009 - 09:38 PM

blkhockeypro19

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Please report back. I have booted into the DVD with my boot disc but I never went through with installing. I have heard that other people have gotten errors using the boot disc method with snow leopard, although this is a modded EmpireEFI disc that came from Prasys, who is a reliable member of the community. I'm not sure if this bug exists in his boot disc. Please tell me how the install goes =) As long as your hardware is the same as mine, it should go well.

Posted 05 November 2009 - 11:21 PM

dr.vox

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Just posting so I get email notification of replies here.

Also, I get pretty much the same KP as Giggles, except I installed my Snow Leo from Leopard which is running on Raid On. Not sure if that makes a difference, but I assumed it would and didn't expect it to run in Autodetect mode.

Posted 05 November 2009 - 11:24 PM

blkhockeypro19

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Just posting so I get email notification of replies here.

Also, I get pretty much the same KP as Giggles, except I installed my Snow Leo from Leopard which is running on Raid On. Not sure if that makes a difference, but I assumed it would and didn't expect it to run in Autodetect mode.

I guarantee MY guide will fail using Raid On. Switch to Autodetect/ATA for this guide.

Posted 07 November 2009 - 11:23 PM

Dan316

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Please report back. I have booted into the DVD with my boot disk but I never went through with installing. I have heard that other people have gotten errors using the boot disk method with snow leopard, although this is a modded EmpireEFI disk that came from Prasys, who is a reliable member of the community. I'm not sure if this bug exists in his boot disc. Please tell me how the install goes =) As long as your hardware is the same as mine, it should go well.

First of all-thank you very much for sharing your expertise and esp. with SL on a Dimension which not many have at present because it is an oldie (but a goodie). Here is my report...

I tried your boot CD on my Dim 9100 which I believe has the same hardware as the e520-except I have the Pentium D 3.2 Ghz Dual Core-I have only one HD connected (removed all my Windows HD to avoid risk of mess ups) to the first SATA port and BIOS set to RAID AUTO DETECT/ATA like you said-when the CD loads-I get error messages saying ramdisk.img not found and ebios error messages-like 4 lines of it and then it comes to the grey screen-I swap the boot CD for the SL retail Disk and then load it-but within a few lines of loading-it gives a message EFI string not found and reboots...so no joy -any ideas?

Posted 08 November 2009 - 05:30 AM

First of all-thank you very much for sharing your expertise and esp. with SL on a Dimension which not many have at present because it is an oldie (but a goodie). Here is my report...

I tried your boot CD on my Dim 9100 which I believe has the same hardware as the e520-except I have the Pentium D 3.2 Ghz Dual Core-I have only one HD connected (removed all my Windows HD to avoid risk of mess ups) to the first SATA port and BIOS set to RAID AUTO DETECT/ATA like you said-when the CD loads-I get error messages saying ramdisk.img not found and ebios error messages-like 4 lines of it and then it comes to the grey screen-I swap the boot CD for the SL retail Disk and then load it-but within a few lines of loading-it gives a message EFI string not found and reboots...so no joy -any ideas?

TIA

Dan

The boot CD contains a DSDT.aml from my computer. That is why it is necesary to do it ony hardware the same as mine. I am currently trying to figure out a way to get the disc to properly load WITHOUT DSDT.AML, when that time comes, I will PC you.

Posted 08 November 2009 - 06:29 PM

Also, I don't understand the DSDT.aml thing any more than I did before. Any chance of some help with how I can get that to work with my system?

once again for all the still waiting for root device errors using my guide, I apologize. Im am trying to figure out how to get ApplePIIXATAFamily.kext to load properly WITHOUT my DSDT. thats why included it, it may work for some, but others it will most likely not work for. As soon as I figure out why ICH8R isnt loading the snow leopard patched ATA kext without DSDT, I'll post back and everything will be updated. Once again I apologize.

And as far as that goes, I'll post an updated guide that will fix that as well as the still waiting for root device errors, can't do much until then... sorry =\

Posted 10 November 2009 - 01:08 AM

Dan316

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The boot CD contains a DSDT.aml from my computer. That is why it is necesary to do it ony hardware the same as mine. I am currently trying to figure out a way to get the disc to properly load WITHOUT DSDT.AML, when that time comes, I will PC you.

Hi blkhockeypro19

Thanks for your kind response. That would be great-if you are able to help out with that pesky file. Somewhere over the rainbow...